The Pilot Worked. Nobody Uses It. Here's the Anatomy.

The five omissions

No production owner — the vendor or the enthusiastic manager moves on and no name is attached to the running system. Median time to silent death is about four months.

It ran on personal infrastructure: someone's laptop, a personal API key, an individual account. The credential dies with the employee and often nobody notices for weeks.

Success criteria were never written, so "did it work?" becomes an opinion contest between the sponsor and the sceptics, which the sceptics win by default. It was piloted with the most enthusiastic user, who works around every defect and reports success while the median user hits the same defects and stops. And it lived beside the daily workflow rather than inside it — a new dashboard, a new URL, a new login, competing with the tools people already have open.

The design fix

Pilots ship into the tool people already open every morning: the CRM task list, the ticket queue, the phone, the inbox.

And every pilot gets a written kill date and kill criteria at kickoff, with kill as the default outcome in the absence of evidence.

Choose your pilot user badly on purpose

Run it with your most sceptical, busiest user rather than your keenest. The enthusiast generates false positives by compensating for defects.

Zombie pilots that neither live nor die consume the credibility budget for the next three projects.